The Swans of Fifth Avenue

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by Melanie Benjamin, 2016, Kindle Version, Delacorte Press 3.0 stars

This book is about the socialites in New York and their relationships with Truman Capote and each other. It provides an interesting portrait of the society at that time and of Capote.

The book is a work of fiction and the various conversations that are recounted are made up by the author. Nevertheless, the book’s portrayal seems realistic. The book also held my attention almost all ot the time despite dragging out a few of the situations a bit longer than I would have liked.

Each of the characters were flawed, but there is also a great deal of insight as to how they became the persons they were. This is especially true of Capote so that while I didn’t like him as a person, I could understand why he was the person he was.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the high society of New York City.

Billy Summers

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by Stephen King, 2021, Kindle Edition, Scribner 3.5 stars 

This is a very interesting tale about a former army sharpshooter who becomes a hired assassin. The book focuses on what he considers his last contract, but he doesn’t know much about who is footing the bill.

King weaves a captivating tale about a conflicted individual, but it sometimes seems to bog down. It’s a big book, over 500 pages, and most of the action takes place in the last one hundred or so pages. Stephen King is a very good writer and he makes the reading of his work very easy. He does, however, take his time setting the stage as he definitely does in this novel.

The Anomaly

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by Hervé Le Tellier, translated by Adriana Hunter, 2021, Kindle Edition, Other Press 3.5 stars 

Something happens on a flight from Paris to New York when the plane encounters a huge thunderstorm that wasn’t predicted. After the plane emerges from the clouds, things are different. The author unfolds the story very subtly, so the reader doesn’t initially know what is going on.

The story’s premise is extremely captivating, but I sometimes got lost in the philosophical and theoretical topics that were included. There were many threads and characters that made the book a little harder to follow than I would have preferred. At least one of these threads could have used further development.

The novel is an extremely interesting book that could have been even better.

Code Name Verity

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by Elizabeth Wein, 2012, Hyperion Press3.0 stars

This novel is about an English woman pilot in WWII and her friend who was trained to be a spy but was captured by the Germans in France. The characterizations and the events were portrayed well, but the book jumped around, so it was difficult to understand what was going on at times. The book did provide insight into the contributions that these British women made to the war effort as the author based the novel on some actual occurrences during that time.

The Long Petal of the Sea

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by Isabelle Allende, 2021, Audiobook narrated by Edoardo Ballerini, Random House Audio3.0 stars

We listened to this book as we traveled north to our summer home this year.

The novel spans decades and crosses continents following two young people as they flee the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in search of a place to call home. They go to Chile, although they also spend some years in exile in Venezuela. Allende uses her knowledge of the history of Chile to weave a tale of hardships and displacement. Unfortunately, the book didn’t hold my interest as much as I thought it could. I just didn’t get into it.

The history presented was interesting as I didn’t realize the impact of the Pinochet regime as well as the shortcomings of the Allende regime in Chile. The circumstances in the Spanish Civil War that caused these persons to flee to Chile were also quite interesting.

The Sentinel

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Lee and Andrew Child, 2020, Random House, LLC 1.5 stars

This might be the worst Jack Reacher book I have read so far. The Sentinel is apparently a system designed to thwart attempts to subvert the election system in the U.S. Reacher gets involved in the plot when he is strolling through a small town in Tennessee and encounters an attempt to kidnap an individual on the street in broad daylight. Reacher decides to help and the plot begins to unfold.

There are several things I didn’t like about the book. First is that Reacher doesn’t seem to connect to any of the victims on a personal basis. In some of the previous novels, he definitely has some sort of personal connection, either with the place or some of the other characters. In this one, there is none.

There is also very little information about this system, the Sentinel. It is mentioned only in a few pages, and we never find out anything about it (how it works, how it is deployed, how it was developed, etc.). One would think that, if it’s so important to protect, we would at least know a bit about it.

Then, there is the plot. It involves corrupt police, the FBI, Nazis, Russians, and several additional non-important characters. It’s convoluted and difficult to know where it’s going at any time. And sometimes it’s not very interesting.

Finally, the writing. The Childs apparently think that short phrases (non-sentences) coming at the reader in rapid succession somehow add to the excitement and suspense. This may be true to some degree, but also degrades the quality of the writing. Coupled with the detailed descriptions of Reacher’s every move when he is fighting his opponents (which becomes very tiresome), the book loses a lot of its potential appeal for me.

If you want to kill some time, you can get through the book. If you want to read a good book, however, there are a lot of other alternatives out there.

A Separate Peace

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by John Knowles, 1960, The Macmillian Company 4.0 stars

This was always one of my favorite books and I saw it in my bookcase so I thought I would read it again.

I believe the books hold on me was due to its setting in a prep school. The time of the book is in 1942 and the war is a prominent theme that pervades the book. While the Viet Nam war was cranking up during my prep school days, it wasn’t really a concern of mine until I arrived in college, but the thoughts and feelings of the young boys in the book relating to the ware were similar to mine while I was in college.

The characters in the book seemed very familiar to me as I was in very close contact with my schoolmates while at my high school boarding school. I must say though, with an intervening period of 50 years or more since I last read it, the book didn’t have the same impact as it once did. I guess that’s to be expected as I have had a multitude of other life experiences over time. I felt the same when I read Catcher in the Rye a few weeks ago. Now I apparently tend to take youthful perspectives with a little more skepticism than I once did.

One thing that I observed now was how self-centered the main character, Gene Forester, was. When he visited his friend, Leper, who had enlisted in the army and suffered a nervous breakdown, he had not an ounce of empathy or pity for him. He just wanted to get away from as quickly as possible and put him out of his mind. I guess i didn’t pick up on this when I read the book years ago. Now I didn’t feel much sympathy at all for Gene. I felt rather that Gene wasn’t a particularly good person. It is interesting how time can change one’s perspective.

The book still seems like a great book to me. The writing is great, particularly his descriptions of the surroundings. The characters are believable, and I can relate to the boarding school environment, even though the strength of my connection has waned considerably.

Zero Fall: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service 

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Zero Fall: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, by Carol Leonnig, 2021, Kindle Edition, Random House 3.5 stars

This book is pretty good as it gives a lot of detail about the problems within the Secret Service over the years. It tracks various failures of the Secret Service to protect the President and his family and what the agency supposedly learned from each of these incidents.

Whil the book is easy to read and well researched, I think it suffers in that it is a very long book, almost 500 pages. When I finally got through reading it, I thought I was glad to be done with it.

What did I take away from this book? I, unfortunately, came away with a sense that the Secret Service as an organization is really in bad shape. There have been numerous efforts by numerous directors to put in place various reforms. Despite these efforts, today’s Secret Service isn’t being run any better than it has in the past. This sad state of affairs is due to poor management, in-bred culture, ineffective recruiting, and chronic underfunding. Prospects for improvement are dim.

So, in spite of the book’s being a pretty good book, it portrays a sad picture and suggests that it isn’t going to get any better in the near future.

J.D. Salinger: A Life

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by Kenneth Slawenski, 2012, Random House eBook Edition

While waiting to get my library copy of The Catcher in the Rye, which was the next book selection for our book club, I inadvertently borrowed this book thinking it was Catcher. When I saw it was a biography of Salinger, I thought what the heck, I’ll read this while I’m waiting. I eventually went to the library to get The Catcher in the Rye and read it, then returnd to this book to finish it.

It actually worked out a bit better to finish this book after reading The Catcher in the Rye as it gave me some insights regarding its meaning. It also gave me a great deal of insight regarding all of Salinger’s writings and thoughts. The biography was published a couple of years after Salinger’s death, so his memory was no doubt fresh in many individual’s minds.

I found this book to be interesting regarding Salinger’s life and philosophy, but it had one large drawback. The author dove into each of Salinger’s writings with a multi-page, blow-by-blow telling of each one. I finally resorted to skipping these pages until the book returned to Salinger’s life. The book, in my opinion, would have been much better if the author had offered only concise descriptions of Salinger’s writings rather than comprehensive retellings. This is especially the case when I might want to read a few of those works and I wouldn’t want the whole story revealed prior to reading it myself.

So, the book gave me a lot of insight regarding Salinger and his works, but I certainly didn’t need the level of detail he included for each of those works. 2.5 stars 

The Catcher in the Rye

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The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, original publication 1951, Back Bay Books Paperback edition 2010, Little Brown and Company, New York

This book, for some reason, was chosen by our men’s book club. It was interesting to go back and read it as I wasn’t sure that I had read it so long ago. I’m also reading a biography of J.D. Salinger so I have a little knowledge of him and how the book came to be written. That extra knowledge gave me an appreciation of his life and some inkling of where he was coming from when he wrote the book.

One thing I learned was how the book was received when it was first published back in 1951. It was immediately praised as a masterpiece and came to be considered one of the really great books of the twentieth century. Reading it today, I can see some of the qualities of the book, but I can’t quite get my head around its being all that great. It now seems somehow dated but I think it’s probably still relevant given the mental struggles that the youth of today are experiencing. Holden Caulfield suffered from a total lack of direction in his life which may be inflicting many of our young individuals today, although Holden didn’t seem to be contemplating suicide as seems to be the trend today. It would be interesting to hear how a young person would react to reading it today.

Holden, even though he seems to be totally lost, has some redeeming qualities. I was amazed when he held to his principles when he disputed the charge for the prostitute that was sent to his room. The easy way out would have been to just hand over the extra five dollars (which he ended up losing anyway. Instead, he chose to have himself severely beaten just because he determined that he was right and the other people were wrong. I suspect that most individuals would take the easy way out to avoid being hurt. He also showed a great deal of empathy for some others and felt sorry for them, even after excoriating them for being phonies.

It was frustrating to read because I kept wanting Holden to wake up and change his ways while, at the same time, knowing that he wasn’t going to. I’m glad I read it, but I’m not able to rate it as one of my all-time favorite books. 3.5 stars